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For the Fourth of July, Independence Day, here’s a poem from the nation’s capital. I wrote this prose poem after a family trip to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2004. There were John Kerry-for-President signs in the windows. GOP posters for “W,” too. Barack Obama was a figure on…
Read More »Before Luna Theatre, before the Lowell Film Collaborative, there was FLICKS! (For Lowell Interesting Cinema KaperS!), a local film society that was popular in the early 1980s. The organization screened films, often at the Speare House restaurant on Pawtucket Boulevard (it was near the Dunkin Donuts, opposite the UMass Lowell…
Read More »“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” —Martin Luther King Jr. Usually I don’t use this space to comment on national issues but I believe that history will record this week to be a momentous one in our nation’s story. That demands comment. Confederate…
Read More »Frequent contributor Jim Peters shares the following: I last wrote about Paul beating me at tennis and my beating him at track. After that point, I continued to bicycle (I bicycled an average of thirty-five miles each day), so I did not need a car. We finished painting his front…
Read More »Again there is activity along River Road in Andover! What will happen to the massive St. Francis Seminary on River Road? Many have fond memories of the Christmas light display created by the seminarians. Just down the street from my home on Fiske Street, the building and property has been…
Read More »It doesn’t take much sometimes. It’s uplifting to see how much people appreciate a positive gesture, no matter what size. In addition to spreading a layer of loam and re-seeding the sports field at the South Common, the good folks at City Hall brought in a pavement company to resurface…
Read More »Nancy Pitkin sent the following about an upcoming selection of the Pollard Memorial Library’s nonfiction book group: Father John’s Medicine is engraved in the lintel of one of the many renovated historic buildings in Lowell on Market Street and is now apartments. I’d always assumed that the name for Fr.…
Read More »Years ago, I wrote a rhyming poem about an incident at Bunker Hill described in Silas Coburn’s “History of Dracut.” The story is that Captain Peter Coburn of Dracut led a company of men from his town in the battle. He was shot by the British three times, in the…
Read More »Today is the 240th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. The battle is noteworthy because it was the first major engagement between the colonial militia and the British troops. Eight weeks earlier, an intense fight had occurred at Lexington, Concord and on the route back to Boston, but while…
Read More »Reaching back into the archive ~ While later today we will remember the 150th anniversary of the dedication of Lowell’s Ladd and Whitney Monument, we will also remember that today June 17 is “Bunker Hill Day” ~ Bunker Hill Day marks the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, also known…
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